


angel of small death

by xombiebean



Category: Daredevil (TV), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Defenders (Marvel TV), The Punisher (TV 2017)
Genre: Angst, Cunnilingus, F/M, Fluff, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Oral Sex, Panic Attacks, Violence, karen page is a modern day fury
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-18
Updated: 2017-04-18
Packaged: 2018-10-20 10:55:46
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,177
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10661124
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/xombiebean/pseuds/xombiebean
Summary: Karen's mother did not raise a monster, but here she is, fully formed, with blood in her teeth.





	angel of small death

**Author's Note:**

> Unbetaed. Title from "Angel of Small Death and the Codeine Scene" by Hozier.
> 
> I don't know where this came from, but here it is. I don't know if I did justice to these characters. I hope I did.
> 
> Warnings for a panic attack and unaddressed alcohol addiction.

"with her sweetened breath, and her tongue so mean  
she's the angel of small death and the codeine scene  
with her straw-blonde hair, her arms hard and lean  
she's the angel of small death and the codeine scene"

 _angel of small death and the codeine scene_ by hozier

 

Sometimes, when she is alone at home, or driving by herself, with all the windows rolled up and doors locked, Karen is engulfed in silence. Like fog rolling in, like the eye of a hurricane, like the moment before thunder sounds and lightning strikes, like a wave crashing down upon her—

The silence isn’t calming to her anymore. It sounds like screaming, her ears ringing as if the absence of sound has unspooled her somehow, yet stretched her so far that she feels breakable, fragile, small. Karen wishes she could say that she doesn’t know when this started but she does. She just wants to be able to curl up in a cloud of denial, pretend that she is the same Karen she was before she unearthed Fisk’s operations in her company. She just wants to feel safe.

Her mother used to tell her that ringing ears meant someone was talking about her, or angels were singing to her. But the only guardian Karen has is the devil himself; beyond that, she knows how to protect herself. Her mother did not raise a wallower. 

Her mother did not raise a monster either, but here she is, fully formed, with blood in her teeth.

 

*   *   *

 

Karen doesn’t like to be alone, but being around too many people makes her nervous. She often finds herself at Josie’s, after work, because she knows the place, and no one pays any attention to her. It feels safe there, between Josie’s sharp demeanor and the memories of Nelson and Murdock, attorneys at law; sometimes she scans fruitlessly, unconsciously, for Foggy or Matt, but she hasn’t seen Matt in months, and Foggy never frequents this place since he and Marci got back together.

Karen finds herself staring at a glass of amber liquid, drinking down to the eel some nights. Most nights, if she’s being honest with herself, but no one likes introspection, especially not those with blood on their hands and hearts that yearn for love and comfort but find little. The whiskey still tastes like shit, but that’s soothing too: the way it burns down her throat, jagged and harsh. She doesn’t need anything more this, she tells herself. Cheap liquor, the .380 nestled in her purse, and her own iron, indomitable will. 

She doesn’t linger tonight. She throws back one glass, two. The cold air stings her face when she toddles out. She’s tempting fate, walking home tipsy and alone at night in Hell’s Kitchen, but fuck it. Nobody looks out for Karen Page but herself nowadays. She’s hollow, without the warmth of her makeshift family. She almost hopes someone comes after her, because she yearns for the opportunity to rage against someone else, to write her existence in someone else’s blood, so that she’ll stop feeling like a damn ghost all the time, slipping from one place to another, unnoticed, unheard, unremembered. She makes it home without incident, locks the door and puts the deadbolt in place. Neither make her feel all the much safer but it is what it is. 

She stops, mid motion of setting her purse down on the kitchen counter. There’s clanking coming from her bathroom, light seeping under the crack beneath the door.

She pulls the .380 from her purse, clicks off the safety and strides, quiet as a cat, to the bathroom door, careful not to let her shadow fall against the light. She turns the knob slowly, almost wishing it would be—

“Don’t move,” she says as she trains her gun on the man in her bathroom. It isn’t Matt. 

It’s Castle.

“What’re you doing here?” she says, her voice wavering in the middle. 

He turns slowly, to face her. His torso is bare and he’s so much thicker, broader than Matt. “Easy,” he says, but there’s a twist to his mouth that reads like amusement. 

He may be, but she isn’t. Karen looks him over, catalogues the overlapping bruises—the purpling along his rib cage, the fading yellow-green along his shoulder, the myriad of scars, a fresh gash along his arm, the skin torn clear off of most of his back as if he was dragged across asphalt, a still healing graze along—

“Did you rip your stitches?” she snaps, exasperated.

He laughs. “What’s it matter to you if you’re gonna shoot me?”

“The last time a man thought I wouldn’t shoot, he ended up dead,” she says coolly, clicking the safety back on. She tucks it away, in the back of her slacks, her waistband hugging the barrel to the small of her back. 

His expression doesn’t change. She doesn’t know why she thought that would shock him. He always could see right through her. “Why’re you here,” she reminds him.

“Karen Page, the Patron Saint of Lost Causes,” he says. She stares at him, cool and unimpressed. “I got in a fight with that fetish superhero daredevil and his girlfriend—wasn’t a happy reunion between the three of us.” She flinches at the word _girlfriend_ , and his eyes are too shrewd, too knowing. He sniffs, his lip curling, as he shifts on his feet. “Think I have a concussion, and uh,” he hesitates, glancing down at the floor and rubbing the back of his neck, before meeting her gaze steady and head on, “you might be the only person who doesn’t actively want me dead in New York.” The request for her to monitor him during the night, for her to _help_ him, hangs in the air between them, unspoken. He doesn’t move, and his expression is inscrutable, although there seems to be a softness in his eyes. Not hope. That’s something neither of them deal in. He seems to be waiting on her to make a decision, and it’s...refreshing, really, after all the decisions others have tried to make for her. He scrubs a hand over his face. “Normally I’d make do, but….”

“Why are vigilantes so damn stupid?” she says, breaking the silence. 

He huffs out a laugh like gravel. “Know a lot of us, do you?”

She doesn’t answer that, stooping down to get her well packed emergency kit from beneath the sink and placing it on the counter. ”I’d tell you to take a shower but you might collapse, and then we’d really be in trouble,” she says and he barks out a laugh. “You want a drink first?” She asks absently, as she pulls out what she needs from the kit: sutures, disinfectant, gauze, medical tape. 

He shifts, and this is the first time she’s seen him look uncertain, really look uncertain. “You don’t have to white knuckle it,” she says softly. “Not here. Not around me.” He nods once, curtly, and she grabs a glass and the bottle of vodka from the freezer and brings them both with her. She pours him two fingers and he knocks it back like it’s water.

After blowing into a pair of plastic gloves to inflate them, Karen pulls them on, and gently cleans the gravel out of his back and disinfects it. His muscles tense in his shoulders, and he exhales loudly when the disinfectant first hits his back. “Christ,” she says, staring down at the raw flesh in front of her; this is how she imagines his prey looks, after the bullets have ripped through them. “I think I have some of Matt’s clothes around here still if you wanted—if you wanted something clean to put on.” She taps his shoulder. “Turn around and I’ll stitch up the rest,” she tells him. He doesn’t argue, just moves to sit facing her, and she disinfects what looks to be another cut and starts suturing that up too. 

“What happened with lawyer boy?” He asks. “Murdock,” he amends, and the word sounds strange and foreign and unnatural on his tongue.

“Turns out you can’t hold onto someone who doesn’t want to hold onto you,” she says. Frank opens his mouth, and she cuts him off. “I love him, but. I don’t think he was in love with me. The idea of me, yeah, sure, but me? He just thought I was just a nice girl.” Frank snorts at that. “I want someone who knows me, who can cut straight through me, and isn’t afraid of what he’s gonna find.”

Frank laughs, and it’s dry and awful, and Karen loves it. “Nice,” he says, spitting the word out as if it tastes foul. “Nice is the last goddamn thing I’d say about you. You are many things, Karen Page, but nice isn’t one of them.” She grins at him, bares her teeth, and he gives her that crooked smile that she likes to pretend she doesn’t long for. Frank knows her; he can see the monster in her, and she wouldn’t have it any other way. “What a fucking idiot.” He shakes his head, as if trying to clear it.

She laughs then, and it’s dry and bitter and awful. “He found someone else who could love him better, someone who knows just how to break him. That’s what you told me, wasn’t it? Find someone who loves you so much that they know how to hurt you?” His eyes are too intense, too knowing, that she has to look away. She moves to his next cut, and it’s deep and jagged, as if someone used a glass shard to carve him up. He winces, and she ignores it. Her stitches are neat and measured. She’s gotten so much better at it. She never thought the embroidery her grandmother taught her would ever come in handy, and definitely not like this.

“What is it you want?” he says, his voice low and deep. She could lose herself in him, and she knows that. Frank Castle is dangerous for her, and yet she can’t shake the desire to hold onto him with both hands and never let go.

“Nothing good for me,” she says. Frank grins at that, wild and wolfish and predatory. She wants him to _wreck_ her. Christ. She needs to get ahold of herself. Don’t trade one dead man walking for another, she tells herself, but Frank is nothing like Matt. He gives her the truth, no matter how brutal, no matter how ugly. “I’ll, um, I’ll just—” She stands and strips off the gloves, tossing them in the trash. She bandages the sutured-up cuts, unable to quite look straight at him. “I’ll get Matt’s clothes, and make up the couch, and uh, set an alarm for every two hours—”

“Karen,” he says, snagging her hand as she turns to go. She looks at him, questioningly. “Thank you, for, uh, for everything. Thanks for not kicking me out on my ass.”

His gratitude flusters her, and she can feel her face flushing. She tucks her hair behind her ears, self-consciously. His eyes are soft and—fond, it looks like. It’s too much. It’s more than she expected from Frank Castle; it’s like staring at the sun: overwhelming and all-consuming.

 

*   *   *

 

All she wants is to enjoy a drink in peace. She’s at a different dive bar tonight, not Josie’s, because this one is closer to her office, and she leaves work well into the night with the need to get completely hammered. She doesn’t want to think about everything bouncing around in her head. It’s been maybe two months since she last saw Castle, and that’s another thing she definitely does not need to be thinking about, right now, in this shitty, run-down bar. She orders whiskey, neat, and it disappears too damn fast. She taps the bar to get a refill and then does a shot of tequila because she’s Karen Page and she fucking can. Her spine prickles and she glances around to figure out who’s the source. A man at the end of the bar is watching her, and his eyes hold the promise of violence. She waits for him to make the next move and it doesn’t take long before he does. 

He stands behind her, and she can feel the press of a muzzle against her back. “Get up, sweetheart,” he says, “we’re going for a walk. Fisk sends his regards.”

“Okay,” she says, her voice tremulous and small. “Just—just let me grab my purse.” she leans forward slightly and pretends to reach for it, then slams her elbow back into his solar plexus. He grunts, and she dodges away from the gun, grabbing her glass and wildly swinging it at him; the whiskey goes everywhere, but the heavy base of the glass slams into his forehead. He stumbles back, his head smeared with blood, and she takes off and sprints out of there, skittering on her heels as they clack against the pavement. She hears the man shout, “FUCKING BITCH,” behind her and she panics. Her heart goes into overdrive, slamming back into her chest with each beat. The bar—the bar had people, witnesses—now they’re outside in the wide open; it’d be easy for him to pull her into an alley. Her death would be chalked up to another mugging gone wrong. She glances back to try to spot the man after her and runs into something— _someone_ —solid.

Frank.

He glances at her, and his face goes hard and sharp. This, too, is a mask, she thinks to herself. This is the face of retribution; this is the face of punishment. His lip curls slightly, and he moves to stand in front of her, his hand already reaching inside his jacket. The man chasing after her peels around the corner, gun first, and Frank doesn’t hesitate. He squeezes the trigger, and he doesn’t miss. The man crumples like a marionette whose strings have been cut. 

“C’mon,” he says, stowing the gun in its holster, before grabbing her arm and pulling her along. He sets a brisk pace. She feels dizzy suddenly, the alcohol and adrenaline catching up with her. As the sound of sirens arises in the distance, he changes direction and yanks her into an alley behind another shitty bar. “They’ll be canvassing the block,” he says, by way of explanation, though he didn’t need to because, fuck, she trusts him, doesn’t she? The realization cleaves through her heart, and she wonders when she became such a sucker for dangerous men with nothing to lose, who find salvation through violence. 

“Sorry,” he says, his mouth twisting.

“Shut up,” she whispers, before she yanks him down by his shirt so that their mouths meet, and _oh_. He’s good at this, she thinks, or maybe it’s been too long since she last hooked up with someone. It’s hard to bring a guy home when you’re jumping at your own shadow and you’re sure as shit paranoid that half the city would kill you, if given the chance. One hand tangled in her hair, the other pressed against the small of her back, he presses kisses against her jawline, his stubble scraping her skin as he tests the spot of skin beneath her ear, making her shudder against him. She pulls him back to her, sucks his lower lip into her mouth; she’s not careful with her teeth, and the hand he has in her hair tightens reflexively. The pressure is just on the right side of painful; it pulls her back down to earth, and they break away, gasping, their foreheads tilted together. Her mouth is gonna be swollen and sensitive tomorrow, no doubt about it.

“STEP AWAY FROM EACH OTHER AND PUT YOUR HANDS UP,” she hears someone shout at them. They disentangle from each other slowly, and she sends up a brief prayer that they can sell this. She can’t see what the cop approaching them looks like; maybe he’s still a green rookie, but maybe that’s asking for too much. He’s got a flashlight trained on them, and Karen squints in its direction.

“Problem, officer?” Frank says.

“Had a report of a shooting; vic was seen pursuing a young blonde,” he says, tilting his head toward her. He sounds older. There’s no quiver of hesitation in his voice; he’s got experience under his belt.

Frank laughs. “You trying to tell me someone’s been chasing a tail I already caught?”

“I’ll need to bring you in for questioning,” the cop says to her. 

“Unless a person can be in two places at once, this ain’t your girl,” Frank says. “Been buying her drinks all night.”

Indecision flickers on the cop’s face as he looks between them, assessing the situation. It looks real, she thinks, believable. Between her messed up hair, the lipstick on Frank’s face, and the way they’re both breathing hard. 

“I should call it in,” cop says. “Take you both down to the station.” He lowers the flashlight, till it points at the ground.

“Hey,” Frank says, “look, if you could do me a solid—” He lowers his hands slightly, so he can point to the wedding band on his ring finger. “The old lady doesn’t know I’ve been screwing around on the side. We don’t need to make a bigger deal out of this than it already is, do we, officer? No reason we can’t all have a happy ending tonight.”

The officer laughs. “Yeah, all right,” he says. “Don’t get in too much trouble, now,” he says, eyeing Karen appreciatively. 

Frank laughs. “Don’t you worry about us,” he says, slinging an arm around Karen’s neck and reeling her in. “Got a key to a motel room with her name on it.”

The cop flicks off the flashlight, and Karen’s got spots dancing in her vision. He turns on his heel, and she hears him say, “Let’s go,” and “Don’t worry about it,” to his partner before slamming the car door. 

“Cops in this city are all scumbags,” Frank spits, and she doesn’t push it, doesn’t correct him about the good ones she knows. She shudders, as if she can just shake off the scummy feeling of Frank and the cop’s interaction. She’s seen worse. She’s been part of worse. “Let’s get you home,” he says to her, gently, as if he’s scared she’ll spook. Placing a tentative hand against the small of her back, he guides her home. She tries not to lean into him, even though she wants nothing more than that in this moment. Frank is solid; Frank is safe. They don’t speak on the walk home. Karen has nothing that she wants to say, or rather, nothing that she’s ready to expel from the safety of her mind into reality. Nothing. Frank seems content to let the silence stretch between them, but then again, she thinks that he’d be fine never speaking again.

Exhaustion hits her halfway up the stairs to her apartment, and she staggers, dizzy with vertigo. “Frank,” she says desperately, reaching for him blindly. 

“Right here, Page,” he says, his voice gruff, as he grabs her waist and holds her steady.

She flushes with embarrassment and thinks, this is what it means to have someone else—it means that you don’t have to carry the weight of the world by yourself anymore. You have someone else to shoulder the load. Her heart feels as if it’s ricocheting against the walls of her rib cage, as if the bars of bone can barely contain it. “Page— _Karen_ —” Frank says, or maybe she’s just imagining it. Everything is so blurry and indistinct. The ringing in her ears turns to screaming, and she claps her hands over them, trying to muffle the sound, but that only makes the sound louder. She wants to get a knife and carve her still-beating heart out of her chest and offer it to the heavens if that would make the angels stop screaming. She tries to suck air into her lungs, terrified that her organs might rupture from suffocation, but the more she gasps for air, the less air seems to reach her lungs. She cannot breathe. She cannot breathe. She cannot—

A soft rumbled plea of _Karen, come back_ , gently pulls her back to shore; she holds onto the sound of the voice, letting it bring her home, back to her bones. She becomes aware of the sensation of her hands being cupped together in rough hands, calloused thumbs rubbing against her palms in gentle circles, grounding her. 

She gasps and feels air finally flooding back into her lungs. 

She is on her couch, and Frank is crouched before her, eyes haunted, face drawn. “Frank,” she croaks, and her voice feels foreign in her own mouth. The roughness of his hands anchor her; he is steady; he is solid. She wonders absently what retribution he will bring her, bloody hands and all.

He moves, and she winces at the loss. The sound of cupboard doors opening and closing echoes between them as he rummages through her kitchen cabinets. The creak of the kitchen faucet, water rushing, and then he’s back. He sets two empty glasses on her coffee table and hands her a glass of water, before twisting the cap off the whiskey and spilling some into the empty glasses. “Drink,” he says, and she obediently takes a long gulp. She’s thirstier than she thought, she realizes, as she drains the glass. When she’s done, he trades her for a whiskey, and drops down next to her, his own in hand. 

“You don’t have to stay,” she murmurs. Her nerves feel frayed and raw, her heart an unsteady, wild thing. 

“All right,” he says, as she lists towards him slightly. He moves away briefly, taking his gun from his shoulder holster and placing it on the coffee table. He sits back, and takes a sip, pulling her closer with an arm around her shoulder, as she settles against him. 

For the first time in a while, Karen feels safe when she falls asleep.

 

*   *   *

 

Karen hits a wall in an investigation on a human-trafficking ring, and she glares at everything, and nothing at all. The walls of her office are closing in on her, and fury and frustration sing through her veins. It doesn’t matter how many times you wipe the city clean; it doesn’t matter how many kingpins you put away or in the ground. The game keeps changing; new players keep emerging. She desperately wants nothing more than to get into a fight and solve her problems with bloody knuckles. The devil is in Matt Murdock, and that seems to be enough of an excuse for him to find salvation that exists only in the spilling of blood. Frank finds justice, retribution, in his killings. Karen doesn’t believe that violence is a solution, but she wonders if there’s something to it, something beautiful and freeing; maybe, she wouldn’t be so afraid anymore. Maybe she would be able to breathe easy again. Maybe the city wouldn’t feel so foreign beneath her feet.

She calls up Foggy, and finds that he’s at his wit’s ends, too; too many sleepless nights poring over mountains of legal documents, terrified for Matt. The violent have the freedom, the luxury of action, where they use violence to protect the people they love, thus assuaging their worries over them. Karen and Foggy, well. It gets real fucking old sitting on the couch praying that Matt’s gonna come back in one piece. 

Foggy drags her to Josie’s; it’s been too damn long since he’s been there and even Josie stops by their perch at the bar to exclaim over how clean cut Foggy looks, how he looks like a bonafide lawyer now. She asks what happened to the dumb one, and Foggy and Karen go quiet. She doesn’t ask again. They drink until Foggy’s singing show tunes, and attempting to hoist himself onto the bar to dance. Josie claps him over the head and he collapses laughing in on himself, caught in a full body laugh, a genuine one, a deep one. Karen has missed this. She’s missed Foggy.

Foggy quiets, and gives her a small, tired smile. “I missed you,” he says. 

“Sometimes,” she says, studying the beer bottle in her hands, “sometimes I wish we could go back to the start. Things felt—”

“Simpler?” Foggy asks her wryly, and her gaze snaps up to look at him. There is pain in his eyes, and he looks old, so much older, like a man with one foot out the door to the afterlife. Ancient.

“Yeah,” she says. The word comes out too rough, her voice cracking on it, and she clears her throat.

“I never thought I would look back on you being set up for murder with nostalgia.” A silence stretches between them, an empty space where Matt would have been. He laughs a little, meanly. “Fuck him, you know?” She doesn’t have to ask whom he means.

A hand descends on her shoulder, and Foggy glowers at someone behind her. Karen twists in her stool to see a man, confident and cocksure, standing behind her. “Hey sugar,” he says, “why don’t you ditch Pillsbury dough boy over here, and let me buy you a drink.” It’s less of a question and more of a very thinly veiled demand, and Karen feels like an old rubber band pulled so taut that it’s about to snap. 

“That’s really very flattering,” she says, “but I, um, I’m just here to catch up with an old friend, so I couldn’t really....” 

“You heard the lady,” Foggy says. “Get lost. Scram. Beat it.”

“Yeah well, I could show you a real good time, sweetheart,” the man says. He leans in to whisper in her ear, “bet I could make you _scream_.”

She snaps.

She whirls against him, heaving herself off the stool and punching him quick and rabbit-like in the kidneys, before crunching his instep beneath her foot and kneeing him in the crotch.

“Jesus, you fucking bitch,” the man says, hunching in on himself.

Karen curls back her fingers, exposing her palm. She draws her hand back and slams her palm into his nose, driving his nose into his skull, the velocity snapping his head back and making him stagger backwards. 

“Karen,” she hears Foggy shout; the noise filters through her ears, slowly and indistinctly, as if from a great distance. The man’s two friends charge her, and she grabs the bottle of eel from the counter. Liquor sloshes out the top as she swings and bashes it against one of their heads, and then the bottle explodes from the impact, showering them with liquor and glass. The other grabs at her, catching her wrist in a grip that’ll bruise later and slaps her across the face hard, before dragging her to the floor. He gets an arm around her neck, and Karen fishtails against him, driving her elbow desperately into his torso, desperate to connect with anything. She turns her head into the crook of his arm to buy herself some more air, before biting down _hard_. His skin breaks beneath her teeth, and he howls, releasing her. She scrambles to her feet as the other guy crumples to the ground, alongside pieces of wood that once composed a stool. 

The sound of a shotgun being loaded and cocked rings in the momentary silence. “Out,” Josie says. “Get the fuck outta my fucking bar.”

The three help each other up and leave Foggy and Karen look at each other.

“You too,” Josie says, and Foggy and Karen share a look, much like chastised schoolchildren, and desperately try not to giggle, punch drunk from the bar fight. 

As they leave, Foggy lists toward her. “Did you see me knock that guy out with that stool? Swung it at his back and broke it, can you believe that?” Foggy is beaming as he speaks, positively glowing, and it’s the most animated she’s seen him since Matt left. His glee is contagious though, and she grins back at him. “Karen, shit,” Foggy says, “I think you’ve gone full vampire. Is that—no, it definitely is—you’ve got blood all over your mouth.”

She bares her teeth at him, scrunching up her nose and pretending to be scary. He laughs and laughs. 

They split a cab and she hugs Foggy tight before heading up to her apartment. She comes home to the lights on in her apartment, Frank tinkering away with his guns at the kitchen table.

She doesn’t know when Frank became synonymous with home, for her. The realization would be terrifying if she wasn’t drunk on liquor and high on adrenaline.

“The hell did you do?” he asks dryly, taking in the mess that she is right now, blood smeared over her lips, down her chin. “Go drinking with wolves?”

Karen bares her teeth at him, and there is something approving in his eyes, at her savagery. “Wolves would’ve been more civilized,” she tells him, with an undignified snort. “Men are the real monsters.”

“Ain’t that goddamn right,” Frank says, rearticulating the pieces of machinery until they are a singular whole once again. He loads the handgun decisively, places it gently on the table, and gets to work on the next one. Karen grabs the bottle of vodka from the freezer and birdies it, before gargling. She spits it out, and the vodka and saliva and blood hit the surface of her sink with a loud clash; it sounds louder than it is. She is more vicious than she looks. She sips straight from the bottle after that. The alcohol burning down her esophagus doesn’t make her cough anymore; it doesn’t even make her wince. “Keep going like this and you’re gonna wind up dead,” Frank says.

She laughs, bitter and dry. “I’m going to die soon anyway,” she says. “I’d rather I chose when, instead of some two-bit criminal who’s pissed because I targeted him for my next expose.”

Frank sets what he’s working on back down on the table. He shoves back from the table with a kind of violence, the chair tipping over behind him, as he stalks toward her. “Don’t be so goddamn stupid, Page,” he says, trapping her against the counter.

Her temper—the one she didn’t realize she had until Murdock and Wesley and Fisk made a mess of her life—flares, and she doesn’t care that she’s at least a hundred pounds smaller than Frank. Her heart pounds in her ears like a war drum, and maybe this is what her life has come to: coming out swinging whenever she’s backed into a corner. Her face is splotchy with rage; she knows it, and she revels in it. “Me? Stupid?” she says. “I’m not the one going out every night, pretending to be some damn superhero, waiting for some lucky fucker to put a bullet through my skull.”

“No,” he agrees. “You’re the one getting shitfaced every night, staggering home, leaving yourself, leaving yourself vulnerable. You’re smarter than this, Page. Yeah, I got a fucking death wish, ‘cause I lost the only people who tethered me to this earth. But _you’re not me_.”

She shoves away from the counter at that, crowds him, and he towers over her, but goddamn if that’s going to get her to back down. “You think you’re the only one to see the shit humanity peddles? Every day, every goddamn day, I see every godawful miserable thing in this city. I’m barely sleeping, and when I do, I wake up screaming. I can’t talk to someone, can’t bump into someone on the street without thinking that they’ve been hired to kill me. I have blood on my hands. I don’t have the luxury of heavy artillery or masks or body armor. I have the words I write and the research I do, and I jump at every shadow. My boyfriend left me for his glamorous ex; Foggy got swallowed up by his job, and all I seem to have is _you_ , Frank Castle. Why’re you here? Why do you keep coming back? Why do you care? What do you _want_ from me?” Tears prick at her eyes, and she brushes them away angrily.

“Because,” he says, his voice gruff and low. “Because you’re the only good thing I got left. You’re—” He shakes his head, struggling to dredge the words out of his throat. “You see things—you’re too sharp for your own good, and you don’t give up on anyone, and you expect the best from them, because you see right through people. Because you’re good and you’re mean and you’re downright vicious. Because you’re the reason I haven’t lost my mind yet.”

Karen lunges for him, all fire and no temperance. Curling her fingers in the front of his shirt, she drags him down and kisses him. It’s open mouthed and messy, tongues pressing against each other, and she feels like a livewire in his hands, unpredictable and dangerous and wild. He pulls back, gasping, his mouth spit slick and ruddy. “Karen,” he says, and opens his mouth to say more, but he swallows the words back.

“Don’t—” she says, desperately, “don’t say anything, just fuck me, c’mon, Frank.”

 He groans, and lifts her up easily, while she twines her legs around him, pressing up against him. She kisses him again, sucking his lower lip into her mouth, and the hand he has splayed against the curve of her ass travels lower until he’s tracing the wet spot on her panties, his palm a heavy weight against her. She squeaks, much to her chagrin, and shudders bodily before trying to grind down against him. They’re moving, but she’s too enraptured by the wet heat of his mouth and the teasing friction against her cunt to pay any attention to where they’re headed.

Frank deposits her on the couch, and she makes quick work of disposing of her panties before he settles on top of her, testing his teeth against her neck and sucking at the worried skin. His hand travels beneath her skirt, the rough pads of his index and middle running against her cunt. She clenches down instinctively, and he pulls back to grin wolfishly at her. He circles his fingers against her cunt, teasing her, and she whines.

“I’ve always loved this part,” Frank says, and before she can ask what he means, he ducks down and noses at the folds of her cunt, then presses an open-mouthed, sloppy kiss against it, his tongue laving over her opening. Karen moans, as he presses his tongue inside her. She shifts her hips, trying desperately to stay still, not to grind down against his face, but it’s been so long since she’s been fucked, and Frank is so goddamn eager for it. He eats her out with a single-minded focus until she’s sopping; her cunt a mess, his face filthy and slick. He tugs one of her legs over his shoulder, so that he’s pressed closer to her pussy, and he’s brutal with the pace, tugging gasps from her that turn into moans. She’s losing it, falling faster and faster to release. He fucks her through it, gets his thumb on her clit, and makes her keen with mind-searing heat, curling up from her stomach, until her whole body is seizing up and her toes are curling.

Karen pushes his head away from her cunt, and smiles down at him, sated and tired. His eyes are soft and reverent, as he stares up at her. “Well, fuck,” she breathes, and he huffs out a laugh.

“You’re a miracle, Page,” he says.

She flushes at that and self-consciously hides her face in her hands. She’s unable to cover her delighted smile, and feels Frank shifting over her and then gently peeling her hands away from her face. She laughs as he smiles down at her, settled for once, the wildness within him calmed momentarily. His hard cock is pressed against her thigh, but there’s no sense of urgency behind it. For once, it feels as if they have all the time in the world. Frank kisses her, and she chases the taste of herself on his tongue. She feels safe, the fire within her banked temporarily.

In the morning, she’ll wake to light streaming through the curtains, and the smell of strong, bitter coffee wafting through her apartment. Frank will be there, sitting at her kitchen table, reading the newspaper, pausing every so often to take a sip of coffee. She will pour herself a cup of coffee and then settle herself on the chair opposite him. She will mention the elusive human trafficking ring that she’s been tracking, and he will put the paper down and grin wolfishly at her. She will smile back, all teeth, all hunger.

Karen was born with blood in her teeth, and she will fight for this city one story at a time.

**Author's Note:**

> come talk to me on tumblr @seashinandbrine.


End file.
